Form vs Function
1. What is the relationship between form and function in architecture today? 2. How are the new uses, technologies, and materials changing the relationship between them? Use contemporary case studies. Use quotes from the 3 articles to support your point of view. Please reference them properly.
Form exists hand and hand with function. It follows function implies a delicate balance and a need for both to be emphasized. Function often accommodates form. Today, this theory of event and form is more emphasized and underlined. Architecture and form was more about the combination and fluidity of spaces, events and movements.
New Uses
Architectural history is resplendent with examples of form forcing function. Ancient cultures often keep the design details of their traditional culture even though their building technology had advanced significantly. Stone elements would be fashioned to emulate the wooden structural elements of the older buildings.
Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City is one of the example. The walls and the floor are one, and the floor rises as a continuous, gently sloping ramp, there is essentially one floor, one exterior wall, and one interior wall. The ramp is the substance that creates the enclosed space.
It is also the exterior form, the circulation, the building envelope, and the exhibition space itself (the artworks are displayed in alcoves spaced at regular intervals along the ramp). It is continuity in structure, space, and form.
‘Any building should be complete, including all within itself’
Frank Lloyd Wright
Instead of many things, one thing.
Technologies & Materials
The overwhelming success of technology that generates rewarding sensual experiences for its users is as much an example as are new construction techniques and materials that create a new experience of space in architecture.
Only when technology became detached from sensual perception did it gain a new quality. When still associated with tool-making and magical thinking, technology was, like building, a bodily experience. Technology is everything that gains physical form through human will. In this regard, the object also reflected its creator, thus creating an animated bond between maker and object.
In 1977, architects Rogers, Piano and Franchini built the Centre Pompidou in the historic downtown of Paris. It is visually dominated by the exhibition of technology. No matter how inappropriate the building may be perceived, its creators made sure that technology as a topic of civilization was meaningfully displayed in the physical world.
“Unite building with reason and let function be the representation”
Lodolí
A good example on this quote is Muller Villa by Adolf Loos. It is located in the leafy area of Stresovice known as Beverly Hills of Prague. The Muller Villa is the materialization of the ideas of economy and utility as seen by the architect.
The capacious design, known as Raumplan, is manifested in the multilevel sections of individual rooms, evidence of their function and symbolism. The Raumplan design continues in the exterior as well, apparent in the white, cubic facade. The building and the interior keep the authenticity of the architectural art.
“Form ever follows function” allows us to start with our emotions, gesture or happenstance and create designs where we can conceive of something that is completely impossible and somehow figure out how to make it function.
